The Soft Fork | Thunderous Hearts Edition
⚡ The Receipts | Make the Second Estate Pay
Thunderous Clouds is what that silence sounds like when it finally breaks.
I first wrote this one somewhere on I-24, driving east out of Nashville after a NAMM show in the early 2000s. The glow of the dash lights flickered off a rain-spattered windshield, the memory of the Twin Towers still raw, conspiracies leaking through talk radio—static and fear blending with the sound of the tires on wet asphalt. I pulled over, knowing that if I didn’t write it down, it would swallow me.
Thunderous Clouds is the emotion I carried into this article: the way grief and confusion blur the yellow lines, the way loss turns into motion because stopping hurts worse—the same ache we feel now, enduring the insanity of greed and treason. 🎧
⚡ Thunderous Clouds — TJ Baden
(3:11)
Press play. Then read on.
Because this isn’t about weather; it’s about who built the sky.
Final Hook Lyrics Adapted for this issue — Thunderous Clouds
Broken hearts, they must be worn
Take these tears, let me bleed
Let the rain wash away the stains of a broken heart
Broken hearts, they must be worn
Take these tears, let me bleed on my chest
On my chest … I go to war
TJ Baden | CreatorHuman ™
The Soft Fork | Thunderous Hearts Edition
The storm didn’t start with lightning.
It started with a whisper—servers humming in basements, markets flickering, donors signing checks behind closed doors. Every cycle, the thunder gets louder, and every cycle we pretend not to hear it.
⚡ The Receipts | Make the Second Estate Pay
In 2024, the U.S. government collected about $5 trillion in total revenue and spent about $6.8 trillion. That $1.8 trillion gap went straight onto the national credit card.
We’re told this is why we “can’t afford” Social Security, Medicare, or basic public infrastructure. At the very same time, the wealthiest Americans were sitting on $46 trillion in wealth—not income, wealth—largely untouched by tax because our system lets them:
grow fortunes through stock appreciation,
borrow against those assets tax-free, and
pass inheritances on without treating them as income.
Working Americans pay 15.3% payroll tax from dollar one, while the richest Americans and their heirs can float, borrow, and die with massive unrealized gains that are never meaningfully taxed.
That’s not a funding problem—it’s a political choice to protect a modern Second Estate.
🏰 What’s the “Second Estate” Today?
In pre-revolutionary France, the Second Estate—the aristocracy—was exempt from taxes.
In the U.S. today, we’ve quietly rebuilt that class:
The wealthiest avoid income tax by holding appreciating stock instead of selling.
They borrow against assets to live tax-free.
They pass on inheritances that aren’t taxed as income.
The estate tax, meant as a backstop, now raises less than 0.5% of federal revenue due to loopholes and sabotage.
Meanwhile, payroll taxes (15.3%) fund ~35% of federal revenue and hit workers from the first dollar they earn.
Translation: workers and high-income earners pay the bills; the ultra-wealthy hold the assets.
☁️ Thunder in the Distance
Every time the market surges, I hear the echo. It’s not applause—it’s pressure. The air before a storm.
When you know the math, you can’t unhear it: one class lives in compounding gains; another pays compound interest.
We were raised to think fairness was arithmetic: earn, pay, contribute. But the formula was rewritten decades ago.
Since 1982, when the SEC legalized stock buybacks, profits stopped flowing out as taxable dividends and started inflating share prices—non-taxable growth that only the wealthy can access.
That’s when the clouds started forming. Forty-plus years later, they’re black with static.
🧭 The Moral Compass Has Spun
We used to measure patriotism by contribution.
Now it’s measured by avoidance—who can hide the most, offshore faster, name a stadium and still claim to be over-taxed.
If those who hold the most wealth contributed at even half the rate of those who work for wages, the field would level itself. They’d still be powerful—but their power would be earned instead of extracted.
Instead, greed metastasized into policy. Surveillance economies, data monopolies, and lobbyist-written laws turned civic life into a market simulation.
The storm isn’t coming—we’re standing inside it.
🧾 Policy Receipts | How We Fix It Without a Pitchfork
We don’t need a cartoon wealth tax chasing assets into shadows. We can act like grown-ups with calculators and spines:
Tax unrealized gains at death — Canada already does it.
Treat inheritances and large gifts as taxable income, just like lottery winnings.
Replace the estate tax with a clear gains-at-death rule—no fake “backstop.”
Reform private foundations and DAFs so donations reach the public within set time limits.
Cap total tax benefits for the ultra-wealthy—workers have limits; donors should too.
Do that, and the $1.8T “mystery hole” stops being mysterious.
It becomes a fixable equation.
🌩️ Thunderous Clouds — The Soundtrack to a System Reset
When I wrote Thunderous Clouds, I wasn’t thinking about charts or genres. I was thinking about a ceiling about to crack.
The track is built like the economy itself—pressure, release, distortion, silence, repeat.
You’ll hear:
Low-end pulses echoing payroll taxes hitting the first dollar.
Metallic snares mimicking server farms and stock tickers.
A vocal line straining against compression, like wages under inflation.
A final drop leaving only a heartbeat and a question:
what if we just made it fair?
Music can’t legislate, but it can make you feel imbalance.
That’s the job of art in an age of audits.
🪙 The Second Estate and the Vote
Wealth doesn’t just hoard money; it hoards influence.
Every loophole in the tax code has a twin in election law. The same donors who shelter profits fund the strategies that shrink the vote, redraw the maps, and rewrite the story.
It’s not ideology—it’s asset protection.
When you can’t defend the system, you defend the scoreboard.
🔧 AI and the Truth Engine — Reclaiming the Green Gold
AI isn’t the villain; it’s the next tool. Used cleanly, it can expose ledgers in real time, trace every dollar from payroll to Panama.
If we can track every worker’s payroll tax to the cent, we can track unrealized gains at death and seven-figure inheritances too.
The deficit doesn’t need to sit on the backs of nurses and baristas; it can sit exactly where the $46 trillion already is.
That’s the real green gold—a system transparent enough that fairness becomes efficient.
🗳️ Why They Fear Majority Rule
The math doesn’t work for them if everyone participates.
Voter suppression, misinformation, and culture-war noise are thunderclaps meant to drown out arithmetic.
When turnout rises, tax reform becomes inevitable.
When turnout falls, the Second Estate buys another fiscal year of silence.
Every time someone convinces a worker that democracy is rigged and not worth the effort, a billionaire quietly collects another untaxed dividend.
That’s the game.
Thunderous Clouds is the counter-rhythm.
🌈 After the Storm
Imagine a world where billionaires pay the same share as the baristas who pour their coffee.
Where taxes feel like contribution, not punishment.
Where giving back isn’t a loophole—it’s a legacy.
That’s not utopia; that’s arithmetic done honestly.
When the sky finally clears, the sound you’ll hear isn’t thunder—it’s applause.
🃏 Stay Human / Stay Tuned
This is just one fragment — the sound of a storm resolving into reason.
Subscribe, share, and pass the ledger forward.
#PowerNotes #SoftFork #ThunderousClouds #StayHumanI
mage © 2025 CreatorHuman | Truth Engine 2550
AI-assisted original artwork generated with OpenAI + TJB style system.